Well.........I am off and running again. Once more on graphics. Arcsoft has put together a really unique application.

They are allowing you to pick your fantasy, from any one of their more than 200 templates, including astronaut, dragon slayer, presidential candidate, skier, swimmer, surfer, fisherman, and on and on........endlessly, it would seem. Can you get this picture? You can have your face on a magazine cover, or you can have your face on Mount Rushmore. In other words, you can have a marvelously hilarious time with this application. Only your own creative talent is your limitation.

Once you choose the fantasy and put your picture in, you can print it, frame it, email it, use it on cards, announcements, posters, etc. There are also many many templates where you can put in more than one picture. The one that I tried was the TajMahal in the background, - and me and my loved one was in the picture. We were there!!! You can also add text to your picture. It is good news that you can save your pictures in many different formats, i.e. bmp, tif, gif, jpg, pcx, tga, eps,and flashpix.

Another feature of the application is that you have Live Video Capture, - for Windows users only. You can capture images directly from the desktop camera, VCR, camcorder or digital camera.

A little bit on the downside. The initial opening screen of the application is too dark. I did not want to disturb my monitor adjustment buttons, so I don't know if that would have made the screen lighter and better. The buttons that are there are good and very intuitive. One of the drawbacks I found, was that once you made a choice of a picture to put in the template, you can't easily go back and change it to another picture, but you can alter the way the picture looks. You can make the face narrower, or wider, etc. You can also alter the color of the face to match the skin color in the template, but this feature has limitations.

To use the application, you need Windows 95/98 or NT, 486 - Pentium recommended; 16mb ram, 24 recommended; and 20mb hard disk space. It is priced at $40.00. It should be noted that this application can be used on a MAC OS 7.5 or higher, and 32 mb ram is required.